Thursday promises to be an eventful day for the iPhone. That’s when Apple will summon the tech press to its Cupertino, California, headquarters to hear about the company’s plans for the mobile device–particularly in regard to applications built by third parties.

All signs point to Apple’s taking the wraps off a software development kit (SDK) that it had promised to deliver in February. And when Apple does grant developers access to building native applications for the iPhone, that will mark a significant new direction for the device since Apple first previewed the iPhone at the January 2007 Macworld Expo.

Back in the days before the iPhone’s launch, Apple resisted calls to open the iPhone to third-party development, citing its desire to preserve the device’s security and stability. By last summer’s Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple offered developers an alternative: They could create Web-based applications that iPhone users would access through the device’s built-in Safari browser.

Though some software developers took Apple up on that offer, others built native iPhone apps anyway. The catch was, to install these third-party apps, users had to “jailbreak” their iPhones, which works by intercepting the communication that is supposed to happen between the iPhone and iTunes–thereby voiding the warranty and running the risk that future iPhone software updates would render the phone inoperable.

In October, Apple signaled an end to this cat-and-mouse game, promising to deliver an iPhone SDK in February. That SDK is likely to be a major focus of the conversation when Apple kicks things off at Thursday’s event.

But the specifics of what Apple plans to say Thursday remain up in the air: How open will the iPhone be to third-party development? Will Apple place tight restrictions on third-party apps, as some reports have speculated, or will those restrictions apply only to paid apps, as others have claimed? And when third-party applications do appear–assuming some won’t be unveiled on Thursday to kick-start development–what can we expect to see?

We won’t know the answers to the first couple of questions until Thursday, and it’ll take a while longer to see what kind of native apps emerge in the wake of Apple’s likely SDK unveiling. But we don’t have to wait to present our own wish list of iPhone applications that we want to see appear in native form.

We convened a panel of iPhone users–editorial director Jason Snell, senior news editor Jonathan Seff, associate editor Dan Moren, and senior editors Rob Griffiths, Dan Frakes, and Christopher Breen–and asked them to assemble a list of the applications they want third-party developers to burn the midnight oil creating. They came up with 25 programs they want right now, which we’ve ranked here in ascending order of urgency.

Did they miss a potential opportunity for third-party software development? Let us hear about it in the comments area below.

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